I should add that the scam-artists know what they're doing and how to entice people.
So while from the very beginning of the ordeal, I knew full on it was a scam. I had no intention of being victimized or participating in anything illicit. I just wanted to see exactly what the scam / game was they were playing.
At least 2 or 3 times I was certain the person or bot on the other end of the line would do one of:
- require I make some incriminating statement or agreement.
- Ask for money.
- Bail on the conversation.
Yet they kept going.
At one point they asked if I wanted to come to them or them to come to me. I responded with "I'll come to you, what's the address?
I figured for sure at this point they'd have to trigger a telling move, but shockingly they gave me an actual address. A check on Google showed it was a legitimate address in a residential neighborhood.
This threw me for a complete loop. There was no way this was a legit person with ads in every county of every state.
My thought was that this had to be either a situation where some national group was going to set something up then inform the local boys in blue. Problem with that was I absolutely hadn't agreed to anything I could get in trouble for. There hadn't been any talk of money at all. Or some kind of national brothel system. Which seemed far-fetched.
After backing out, eventually I requested "come to me". At that point I finally triggered the ask for up-front money that I had expected and a "rate" statement. I was invested enough at this point, and felt they'd played well enough that I tried to clearly state that while I'd never pay up-front, if they showed up at the public location I'd stated I'd pay their rate for nothing more than to sit at the bar and drink with me for the time and that the public location satisfied the claimed concern of "safety" for the girl. I would have. Perhaps part of this being the very real concern at this point that I was jerking around some organized criminal enterprise and didn't want any trouble with that either!
Of course, we know that wasn't going to happen and didn't.
My best guess is that this was some very cunning off-shore operation that gave zero fucks in their pursuit of cash.
In hindsight, I think the "how far are you away", "how long until you get here" questions were probably setting up for the pre-pay ask. But that's completely fucked up. The scammer literally put out some random persons house! So some fool falls victim to the scam, pays the pre-pay and then some unsuspecting person gets a potentially angry monger knocking on their door? That's fucking dangerous, but that's the length some of these scammers will go to in order to try to get $20, $40, $50 in a fraudulent manner.